Soft, spongy, and flexible robots have been a promising field of research for a while now, but they do have some common limitations. They tend to be built for single purposes, and are difficult to customize for new tasks. Enter the modular soft robot — a new design from researchers working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
The basic module of this bot is comprised of three pneumatic pumps that expand and collapse to change direction. These units can be stacked together as easily as Lego, and as soon as they’re slotted into place, they share the same power source and control system. In what the researchers claim is a first for soft robots, they’re also powered entirely by a vacuum, rather than using...
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